School Daze

“From the intimate, funny sexual battleground on which Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It unfolded, Mr. Lee has moved on to bigger, bolder and messier ambitions. The new occasion is ”School Daze,” his scathing look at a fictitious white-financed, all-black college whose motto is ‘Uplift the Race.’

This, in Mr. Lee’s mind, is a place whose population is sharply divided: for every light-skinned, affluent sorority girl affecting blue contact lenses, there’s a darker-skinned, poorer, less artificially coiffed classmate who bitterly resents such aspirations. The film labels these factions ”wannabees” (as in ”wanna be better than me”) and, to give some indication of its level of malice, ‘jigaboos.”” – Janet Maslin, The New York Times (1988)